“Or I could click seventy buttons.”

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one… …because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently. Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this… …and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there are some things that LaTeX makes much easier: there is absolutely no need (or peer pressure) to spend time styling the document by choosing fonts, colors, etc., there is no “live preview,” and making a PDF is a separate step similar to compilation in coding – which means it doesn’t constantly occupy your mind, GUIs can slow you down because the keyboard is faster than the mouse, LaTeX doesn’t give you a lot of control over positioning, which is better than giving you only a semblance of control…